In honor of that occasion, Earthcam, which has been monitoring the site with great fervor, put together a timelapse of the tower’s rise. It is an amazing site to behold, if also a troubling one—how did it take eight years for a tower, even one of this magnitude, to rise? (Well, we sort of know why. Still, it took half as long for the twice-as-tall Burj Khalifa, though that is also another story of immigrant labor and infinite money.)